Top crypto stories of week 43, 2023
Mon 23 to Sun 29 October 2023
The 20 top stories on Kiwi News from Mon 23 to Sun 29 October 2023, ranked by upvotes, comments and clicks, with 0 comments in total. Most-shared sources: prop.house.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Hard pivot from crypto (medium.com)
The author, who says they have worked with at least 5 to 10 startups that pivoted away from crypto since the start of the year, argues that founders should weigh several factors before leaving crypto rather than abandoning it on sentiment. They point to a pattern in which sentiment hits rock bottom in the second half of the second year of a bear market, and say crypto cycles have lasted 4 years. They also note that everyone they know who left crypto in the last bear market regretted it, and that crypto products usually grow in a staircase pattern rather than a smooth curve. The author says founders typically need 1 to 2 years to find a market secret, and that staying in crypto after that period builds advantages a founder would lose by switching industries.
- Kiwi News Optimism grants application (vote.optimism.io)
- Internet Artifacts (neal.fun)
- PurpleDAO: Retroactive Funding Round 4 (prop.house)
- Hester Peirce: Statement of Dissent on LBRY (sec.gov)
Hester Peirce, a Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner, argues in a dissent that the Commission's enforcement case against LBRY, Inc. was misguided and disproportionate. She notes that LBRY lost in federal district court on whether its token sales were an unregistered securities offering, and that the company will now shut down rather than appeal. Peirce states that the court found no fraud allegations, that the Commission first sought $44 million before pairing its penalty request back to $111,614, and that the outcome forced entrepreneurs to abandon a functioning blockchain.
- Fresh 4 Trash (swap NFTs for coupons at Kaufland Germany) (fresh4trash.io)
- Vote with your KiwiKarma in our first retroactive funding round! (prop.house)
- Correcting Recent Claims on Crypto's Role in Terrorism Financing (chainalysis.com)
Chainalysis argues that recent estimates of cryptocurrency-based terrorism financing after the Hamas attack on Israel overstate the figures because they count all flows through service providers, not only funds tied to terrorism. Terrorist organizations have historically relied mainly on fiat-based methods such as financial institutions, hawalas, and shell companies, and the company says cryptocurrency is not an effective way to finance terrorism at scale. In one example, a wallet tied to terror financing had 20 suspected service providers as counterparties, and one address received about $82 million, of which roughly $450,000 came from the terror-affiliated wallet.
- The Dark Forest theory of the Internet (archive.ph)
- What are warps? (warpcast.notion.site)
- A new way to monetize your NFTs (kaloh.xyz)
Kaloh argues that protocol rewards, a mechanism recently developed by the NFT marketplace Zora, could make free NFTs a sustainable way for creators and third-party curators to earn revenue. Zora's protocol collects a small fee of 0.000777 ETH (about $1.40) from collectors when they mint, and directs portions to creators, referrers, curators, and the first minter, with no gas fees for creators. Kaloh says the design lets third parties such as dApps, galleries, and newsletters earn a share of sales they originate, and cites Farcaster and Lens as examples of high-scale applications using it.
- Designing F2P music with a focus on fun (danfowler.substack.com)
The essay argues that F2P music products should be designed around the varied motivations of fans rather than chasing "superfans" or gamifying platform metrics. It adapts Nicole Lazzaro's "4 keys to fun" into four fun trees for music: Competitive, Casual, Creative, and Community. The author notes that in F2P models about 90% of revenue typically comes from 1% of users, so designing only for the most active users neglects the 99% who populate the experience. The essay also maps current platforms to these fun trees, finding that streaming services mainly serve Casual Fun.
- Why We Don't Generate Elliptic Curves Every Day (words.filippo.io)
Filippo argues that user-generated cryptographic parameters, such as custom elliptic curves, are unsafe and offer no significant benefit, so modern cryptography is better served by fixed standard parameter sets. He says the old rationale for custom parameters, avoiding a single shared target, no longer fits an era where even one key breaking is considered unacceptable. He also points to the 2015 Logjam attack, where the custom-parameter negotiation added complexity that led to the attack's worst parts, and to a 2020 Windows vulnerability that let attackers fake signatures by controlling custom curves. Generating parameters can also be slow, with openssl dhparam 2048 taking more than 17 seconds on the author's M2 machine, and verifying them is harder still.
- What is DePIN? Learn How Crypto is Powering Physical Networks of the Future (blog.streamr.network)
DePIN, short for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, is presented as a new crypto-based model in which everyday people own and operate physical infrastructure instead of large corporations. The article argues this follows a cycle from centralization toward decentralization, citing The Master Switch. It gives examples such as Althea for internet bandwidth sharing, DIMO for vehicle data rewards, and WeatherXM for weather station data, and notes that DePIN projects can still suffer from poor management or scams, pointing to Pollen as one example.
- TRIP - The Rideshare Protocol (trip.dev)
- NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12 billion miles away (bgr.com)
NASA has completed a software update for Voyager 2, now over 12 billion miles from Earth, meant to keep the probe running longer and avoid a problem that affected its sibling, Voyager 1, in 2022. The update took almost 18 hours to transmit, and NASA scientists are reading out the AACS memory to confirm it is in the right place before triggering the update on October 28. NASA plans to use Voyager 2 as a testbed and, if all goes according to plan, to send the patch to Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away.
- JPMorgan's Evil Corp impression: JPM Coin now handling $1B TXs daily (archive.is)
- Introducing SongTech: Submit Spotify Links, Create Token Markets & Earn Revenue. (mirror.xyz)
- Generative Art Timeline (timeline.lerandom.art)
Generative Art Timeline is an interactive web history of generative art, written primarily by Peter Bauman with contributions from Sasha Stiles and Vuk Ćosić. A dice-roll feature lands readers on one of its 1,147 moments and notes that Johann Philipp Kirnberger published a way to compose music with dice in 1757. The page links to sections titled "A History of Generative Art," "What Is Generative Art?" and "AI Art Timeline: From AARON to Learned Image Models."
- Elon Musk’s chaotic first year at Twitter leaves X Corp. with shaky finances (arstechnica.com)
A year after Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the company he renamed X is in shaky financial shape, with fewer users and sharply lower advertising revenue. A report by The Information said X's daily active users dropped 3.7 percent to 245 million since the purchase, while Sensor Tower found X's August 2023 usage was 91 million hours per day, down 13 percent year over year. Guideline data cited by MediaPost showed X's share of US ad spending fell from 12 percent to 5 percent during Musk's first year. Travis Brown estimated that 950,000 to 1.2 million people pay for X's $8 monthly premium service.